The Animatic-Fitting In

Initially, our team had a bit of trouble with our animatic. The key with an animatic is for it to have a consistent look and smooth motion-to keep it simple enough to just get get the story across and no more. Over complication definitely hindered our first animatic, with colours, different styles from each person and different methods of working (traditional and digital). We were also pretty pushed for time this week, which didn’t help much! It’s really not good…however we did create some atmosphere and shots that would continue on through the whole process, so definitely not time wasted!

I was actually really happy with how my quick title shots turned out. Although they are very sketchy and rough!

To resolve the animatic problem, Myself, Yazz, Clare and Holly sat down to discuss possible options for moving on. With a far more solid idea of what we wanted our camera angles to look like, and where we would cut the animation, we got to drawing up a new rough storyboard. Not everyone in the group had access to the right materials at this time, so we decided that we would draw up a rough storyboard first, which would be transferred to digital once the angles were all worked out. This way, we would end up with an animatic that flowed and was stylistically sound. I began by drawing up the first few frames, along with a few roughs for in between. Clare took on the job from there, and did an amazing job at figuring out camera angles that would work seamlessly with each other…a massively time consuming and tedious task! While she worked on with that, I got to creating some final character designs, so that when it came time for me to draw it up digitally, I would know exactly the look we were going for.

Once I had the frames from Clare, I got to drawing them up in Photoshop, adding a paper texture to the background and some additions of colour to tie it in nicely with our childhood theme. After looking at some Pixar storyboards, I had noticed how keeping the mood and atmosphere of the idea constant-even in the practical, planing phases- was so important in really nailing down the feel of the project. I also added in some extra frames just to make the piece flow, as well as a title sequence. I love working with Clare on projects like this. We often share a very similar idea of the end goal, and will stop at nothing to achieve that goal! Since the animatic, we have changed quite a few camera angles, just to make the audience feel more a part of the action, and to draw your eye to the right spot in the scene…but the main angles all stayed fairly accurate to the animatic!